We've looked at the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting the TRAPPIST-1 star with ground and space telescopes like Spitzer, Kepler, Hubble, and, soon, the James Webb Space Telescope. 'When we get up close, and this is the first planet we've actually been able to open up and look inside, this is going to tell us a lot about how giant planets work throughout the galaxy,' says Bolton.The most studied planetary system, aside from our own solar system, lies about 40 light-years away. The findings from the Juno spacecraft are shedding light on the early formation of giant planets like Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - and even planets beyond our own solar system. 'Understanding what's happening with the storm now allows scientists to make much more sophisticated models to simulate what we see and then make predictions for what will happen in the future, including up to perhaps when the Great Red Spot may eventually go away,' says planetary scientist Paul Byrne. 'I don't think the theory is very far advanced to the sense where we can connect all of that to the changes in the size,' said Bolton.ĭata from Juno will help scientists predict what could possibly happen to the Great Red Spot. The storm itself also appears to be trapped by powerful conveyer belts of wind on the planet that are stabilizing the storm. The spacecraft is observing flecks of the storm getting caught up in neighboring clouds. Space If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years 'What we're doing is seeing up close what's happening while that shrinking has happened,' says Bolton. Juno is taking a closer look at this phenomenon. For nearly a century and a half, the iconic spot has been getting smaller and it's unclear just how long it will last.

Observations of the Great Red Spot show that it's shrinking. The findings from the gravity observations complemented Bolton's earlier microwave measures, concluding the storm penetrates some 300 miles into Jupiter's atmosphere. 'The precision required to get the Great Red Spot's gravity during the July 2019 flyby is staggering,' says Parisi. Using this effect, the spacecraft could pick up tiny jostles as small as 0.01 millimeters per second. That changing distance caused the radio waves sent back to Earth some 400 million miles away to be subtly squeezed and stretched, a phenomenon known as a Doppler shift. Scientists here on Earth could see the effect of these gravitational 'bumps.' That's because every time they jostled Juno, they nudged the spacecraft closer to or farther from Earth. 'The local gravity tends to pull and push away the spacecraft as it flies over the vortex, and this creates sort of like bumps in the road for Juno,' says Marzia Parisi, a Juno scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of a paper in the journal Science on gravity overflights of the Great Red Spot. The storm is so massive that its gravity field actually jostled the spacecraft during its flyby. (Compare that with big storms on Earth, which generally last a few days or weeks at most.)ĭuring its 2019 pass over the Great Red Spot, the Juno spacecraft buzzed the planet at a blistering 130,000 miles per hour. Really, 'it's not all that dissimilar to the kinds of things we know as cyclones or hurricanes or typhoons on Earth.'Īt 10,000 miles across, the Great Red Spot is the largest storm in our solar system and has been continually observed for around 200 years, but it's been around for much longer. 'It's basically clouds,' says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St.

The Great Red Spot is like a storm here on Earth, but supersized. But thanks to a NASA spacecraft launched a decade ago, we're finally getting a look inside Jupiter's storm. Until now, scientists could only observe the spot from afar.

It's bigger than our own planet, and yet we don't know much about it. It's called the Great Red Spot, an enormous vortex that has been swirling for centuries. Jupiter is well-known for being the biggest planet in our solar system, and it's also home to the biggest storm. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstäd/Seán Doran © CC NC SA

This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in northern territory.

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